Business in South Africa: Strategic Decisions

Introduction and background

It is imperative for small and big businesses to strategize in order to manage themselves and their projects proactively with emphasis on long-term strategy. These strategic decisions must be planned and executed carefully in order to help a business be more competitive, be more profitable and ultimately ensuring its continued existence. Significant research in strategic management really started around the times of World War 2 when export and trade started to thrive, however a lot has changed in the internal and external environments since then.

Business environment

The modern business environment is very active as there is so much growth and change in almost every sector of business. Very good examples comes to light when studying the apparel retail and heavy construction industries over the last two decades. New technologies, globalization and liberalization has forever changed the environment business is being conducted in. At present, there are not too many restrictions in the exchange of goods and services between countries and this supports an extremely competitive business environment. In a study by Reinartz, Dellaert, Krafft, Kumard, Varadarajan (2011), they affirm that there is a progression of globalization of retailing and globalization by retailers. Furthermore, that this is accelerated by economic growth and population growth in emerging as well as less developed markets. In addition, online shopping has been a very big contributing factor to streamline this process. For example, goods produced in one country is available in almost every other.

Information

Jenster (1987) stipulates that effective progress in strategic development and the execution thereof is strongly depend...

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